Recruit and serve the students of the future

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred fundamental shifts in the student experience. While many reflect temporary shifts of necessity, others will leave enduring changes on how future students approach and interact with higher education, and how leaders should serve them. By drawing on insights from consumer behavior trends and generational analysis, we've identified key pandemic-era experiences that will likely influence student behavior for years to come.

Read our key takeaways from Enrolling and Serving the Students of the Pandemic: What Higher Ed Leaders Need to Know About Tomorrow's Students below, and make sure to check out next steps. You'll learn how colleges and universities must respond to restore student trust and demonstrate the long-term value of education.

Download the resources from the roundtable on serving tomorrow's students.

Review the Key Takeaways

The student experience during the pandemic has been shaped by loss of experience, loss of quality, and loss of trust

Together, these losses meant that students were deprived of the typical or expected college experience. The result? Students have prioritized short-term experiences over long-term investments, demanded high-quality digital interactions, and faced disillusionment which prompts disengagement and activism. Higher ed leaders will have to continue to grapple with and respond to each of these losses even after the pandemic, in order to recruit and serve tomorrow's students.

Students are focusing less on higher ed's return on investment and more on return on experience

Financial and experience scarcity leads students to prioritize short-term, transactional experiences over long-term investment gains when determining value. As a result, students are seeking to construct experiences that meet their needs, seeing everything from tuition charges to financial aid offers as negotiable, and taking their dissatisfaction directly to senior leaders.

35%

Only 35% of students said that demonstrating positive employment outcomes for students would make it "very likely" they'd reenroll at the institution.

83.5%

This is a shift compared to the 83.5% of 2019 freshman that said improved job prospects were "very important" in deciding to go to college.

Students want and expect quality online experiences post-pandemic, even though virtual instruction has been disappointing so far

Today's students are digital connoisseurs and they have high expectations for quality digital experiences. Student expectations of virtual environments set by the hyper-digital non-academic world have been unfulfilled by remote instruction, resulting in significant backlash. But even with such a negative virtual experience, today's students still want and expect high quality virtual experiences even once they return to campus.

Low-quality virtual instruction

An EAB analysis of over 130 student newspapers showed that students were 2x more likely to reference poor quality of online instruction as a negative, rather than the online medium itself.

But continued interest in online learning

68% of college students in spring 2020 said they want their courses to include some degree of online learning post-COVID.

Students are disillusioned with higher ed and university leadership, resulting in disengagement and activism on campus

Students have a growing belief that higher ed has broken its social contract with students by prioritizing "profits over people." As a result, many students are disengaged with their college experience both in the classroom and outside of it. This disillusionment has also prompted institutionally-targeted activism on and off campus. Restoring the lost trust will be crucial to enrolling and engaging students in the years to come.

"2020 has made it obvious that modern life is deeply flawed and that hard work in the future is needed to fix these flaws. Considering this, students have earned a right to exhaustion and disillusionment."

Take the Next Steps

Share Summary Slides

Share our research on the future of student support with your colleagues.

Assess Student Activism

Our resource center will help you build trust with student activists.

Boost Mental Health

Explore 10+ resources to expand mental health support for students on campus.

User Experience Audit

Identify and scale the services that need to remain virtual beyond the pandemic.

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